In his Magnum Opus The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway describes the disillusioning, misguided, and ultimately self-fulfilling story of young adults in postwar France and Spain. He narrates their exorbitant lives filled with drinking, surface-level relationships, and the unsatiated pursuit of wealth. Residue from World War I—in both the gross disregard for human life for an arguably political outcome as well as the precedent-driven “return to normalcy” policy coined by President Warren G. Harding—alienated young Americans.
Hemingway, in citing Gertrude Stein, calls these individuals the “Lost Generation,” or those who were grossly awakened by real-world atrocities and subsequently found little interest in traditional enterprises. The label referred to young adults who felt that the conservative values instilled in them from the generations above them held no meaning in a postwar society. The “Lost Generation” had no one to hold their hand in a world broken by a global catastrophe.
We are this decade’s lost generation.
During the height and immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, countless discussions surfaced of the privileges and experiences we lost, as well as the potential implications a two-year void would have. In addition to coping with lost loved ones from COVID-19, the transition to at-home quarantine and virtual graduations, proms, and modified beginning years of college, all challenged us to cautiously preserve tradition in a world that set arbitrary thresholds to distinguish the healthy from the sick.
Nearly two years later and the once-ubiquitous pandemic conversations have seemingly evaporated. Everyday life, travel, and work have all returned back to normal, as if the nearly two year chasm from 2020-2022 had never happened. While I never do a double take when I see someone wearing a face mask or discussing a new vaccine, I find myself rarely interacting with the aftermath of the pandemic in my everyday life.
Yet as the sun begins to set on my Harvard college experience, and I witness and help mentor the younger generations of students on campus, the fruits of the pandemic begin to return and form an unavoidable pit in my stomach. The time we lost to COVID caused more than just a temporary adjustment to zoom classes and a normalization of quarantine.
The 2020-2021 school year lasted for three, in-person months in Cambridge. Only first-year students were initially invited to campus, and international students were unable to join. In that time, 18 and 19 year olds were introduced to the Harvard community and their college careers in isolated 10′ by 10′ dorm rooms, sitting in front of laptops for 12-14 hours each day attending virtual classes and meetings, and awarded with pre-prepared and cold dinners to be microwaved each night. Daring to see other students in-person was academic suicide: several students I knew of were kicked off campus, placed on probation, or threatened with expulsion for attending off-line social events.
In November of that year, we were expected to leave campus until the 2021 fall semester. In Harvard’s eyes, three months of virtual (or otherwise illicit in-person) acclimation was sufficient in both providing first-years the introduction to their Harvard experience and preparing them for the next three years. When we became sophomores during the 2021-2022 school year, the previous pandemic-induced power vacuum of free-time became clogged by endless opportunities, expectations, and people to meet. We were treated as upperclassmen—expected to determine our concentrations, career paths, and extracurricular goals with nothing more than three months of pathetic Harvard exposure under our belt.
This awkward phase of experiencing everything—Harvard classrooms, buildings, weather, sports, and even peoples’ faces—for the first time, yet still being treated as students who had been there for years, was exacerbated by welcoming hundreds of additional students, who were originally Class of 2023, into our family of ’24. Not only was our high school senior year—a traditionally celebratory and reflective year of completing our adolescent journey —robbed from us, but we were also left to learn how to leave our nests and become Harvard students with no physical instruction, guidance, or mentorship. And now we were being evaluated against students years older than us, who had both.
In no way is this letter a plea for sympathy or a self-declaration of victimhood, and I must add that I recognize my privilege to have had the ability to learn and stay healthy in a state of such calamity. Rather, it is a recognition of the prowess that the pandemic gave to the original Class of 2024.
The 2020-2021 school year, for those students who came to Harvard for the first time, or logged in virtually as first-years miles away, has instilled the skills of fortitude and perspective that few people can comprehend. Though not sparked by a world war or celebrated with copious amounts of alcohol, COVID-19 has turned the (original) Class of 2024 into a Lost Generation—given minimal resources for a (now) hypercompetitive environment. Previous values of structure, seniority, or precedence no longer interest us; that’s what happens when you take arguably two of the most formative years of a young adult’s life, and turn them into an unstandardized, virtual, do-it-yourself experience.
The Lost Generation of the Class of 2024 is one that cherishes immediate and physical relationships, not those fueled by external incentives. The Lost Generation turns long-term goals into present day tasks, as they know that nothing in this world is an entitled right. Though the Lost Generation does not follow the rules, for they know all too well about the value of personal and mental health, the Lost Generation cares about each other, and does whatever they see necessary to help one another out.
They respect authority, but are not codependent on the traditional support systems that have been instilled for generations. They appreciate solitude, simplicity, and the beauty of a world off-line. The Lost Generation of the Class of 2024’s college experience compares to no other year, but it will prepare us for the professional world with more grit and perspective than any other.
Marbella Marlo ’24 (mmarlo@college.harvard.edu) is the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Independent.